Friday November 13, 2009
Taylor made for success
The only way is up for country music sensation Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift made history at the Country Music Awards on Wednesday, becoming the youngest person to win Entertainer Of The Year and the first solo female to win it in a decade (Shania Twain won in 1999). The tearful 19-year-old was the evening’s top winner with four total awards. It’s no wonder then that the country singer-songwriter is one of the biggest stars in music today. With the combined singles from two albums – Taylor Swift and Fearless – she is right up there with the other females (Beyonce, Britney, Pink, Rihanna) with the most top 40 hits this decade. Fearless debuted at No.1 on Billboard’s Album chart last year. Its sales were the highest debut of any country artiste that year (the album has sold over four million copies to date) and Swift went on to become Billboard’s best-selling artiste as well as top Country artiste and hot Country songwriter for the year 2008.
Earlier this year, at the 44th Annual Academy Of Country Music Awards, the teenager picked up Album Of The Year honours as a performer and producer for Fearless, becoming the youngest artiste in history to win the Album Of The Year award. She was also awarded the Academy’s Crystal Milestone Award, given for Outstanding Achievement In Country Music, and has been lauded for attracting a younger audience to the genre.
In September, Swift’s win for Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards was outshone by Kanye West’s now infamous outburst onstage during her acceptance speech. The rapper felt Beyonce better deserved the honour. Swift, nonetheless became the first country music artiste to win a VMA.
Here, she shares some of her thoughts on her career thus far.
How old were you when you started your career?
I started wanting to do music when I was 10. I became obsessed with music when I was six, when I bought my first LeAnn Rimes album and I was hooked.
When I was 11, I begged my parents to take me to Nashville because I’d seen a TV special on Shania Twain and Faith Hill, and it said that they went to Nashville, and that’s how they made it in the music industry.
I didn’t get a record deal then, but I realised at that point that Nashville and the music industry are huge, and there are hundreds of thousands of people trying to do exactly what I wanted to do, and I needed to figure out what made me different.
And that’s the time when I discovered songwriting and playing the guitar.
Tell us about your grandmother’s influence?
When I was growing up my grandmother (Angela Ann) was an opera singer. She’d been famous in Puerto Rico and Singapore when my mum was growing up, before she moved to the United States.
My grandmother used to sing in church every Sunday, and I think that seeing her every week made me realise, subliminally, that performance is nothing, because she does it every week and that’s normal. It really helped me with all that.
Did you find that people didn’t take you seriously being so young?
There was a bunch of times where I had to work a little harder to gain respect because I was 14, and trying to do things that people twice my age were also trying to do. One of the things that I was really proud of was that I moved to Nashville when I was 13 with my family, and I knocked on the doors of publishing companies until I found one that would sign me to a songwriting deal.
It happened to be one of the biggest ones in Nashville, and I was the youngest person that Sony Publishing had ever signed to a writers deal. That was my job, and I took it very seriously. I used to come in so over-prepared that I made a lot of good relationships with a lot of the songwriters and I gained some early respect for songwriting because I was really intense about it.
As a performer, who would you say are your main influences?
As a performer I really looked up to the Dixie Chicks because they played their own instruments, and Shania Twain because she wasn’t afraid to run around on stage, break a sweat and get the crowd going crazy. Garth Brooks also did an incredible job of that. I’ve always looked up to those people.
Did you expect this sort of success?
I don’t think I ever expected the first record to sell three million records, that seemed like an impossible goal. I set my sights really low just because you don’t wanna be disappointed or get heartbroken, or have these expectations and presume that you deserve things right out of the gate.
I think that when you set your sights low and hope for the best, and aim high while expecting that you’re not really going to get there, if you get really, really lucky and have big numbers like that and sell three million records, every day you wake up with a smile on your face because every day is a bonus day. ● Taylor Swift’s Fearless platinum edition repack (CD + DVD) is due to be released locally on Nov 23 ... look out for it!
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